Driving the Green Book Quotes

“How did sundown towns become such a widespread phenomenon in the North? A major part of the explanation is the rise of virulently racist groups. The 1920s was a major period of rebirth and growth for the Ku Klux Klan, not just in the South, but also in the North. Some 15,000 Klan members attended the state convention in Maine in 1923; an estimated 10,000 people attended a Klan rally near Montpelier, Vermont, in 1925. That same year, The Washington Post estimated Klan membership in New England at more than half a million. Others estimated membership in New Jersey at more than 60,000. The Klan, primarily groups of white Protestant Christians who donned white robes and conical hoods, threatened and terrorized Blacks in particular. James Loewen points out in his book "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism" that the Klan members didn't reserve their hatred for Black alone: they reviled and threatened Jews and Catholics as well as any ethnic group they viewed as only marginally white—Italians, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans. But they reserved their intense hatred and most egregious acts of violence for Blacks. Such domestic hate groups often operated with impunity because of indifference or support, tacit or explicit, from local governments, police departments, elected officials, and citizens.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“The difference between [Jan] Miles's [(The Post-Racial Negro Green Book)] and Green's listings and updates is stark. Green's was a chronicle of the expansion of freedom as more people in towns and cities across the United States created new businesses, deploying their financial and emotional capital to help make life better for locals and for people traveling through their areas. By contrast, Miles's ongoing listings feel like a narrowing of or regression from the freedoms achieved. Or is it an unveiling of the truth, via technology and social media, that never went away during the years of perceived openness, of racial progress?”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“When the laws changed, what do you suppose happened to the vehement and the violent? Do you believe their opinions of Black people changed? Do you think they decided they had been wrong and adjusted their ideologies and beliefs? Of course not. They had to comply with new societal standards and public laws, but their feelings remained the same. And...these people had children. And their children had children.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“Most white people had never heard of [The Green Book] until the 2018 movie bearing its name premiered.... Perhaps closer to the truth, many white people during the time it was published could not have imagined that Black people could be resourceful enough to create and distribute such a directory. They had given little, if any, thought to what it was like for African Americans to drive the roadways; to buy gasoline; to stop to eat food, drink water, or use the bathroom.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“From the 1930s through the 1960s, Black people, especially those recently arrived in the North, were largely excluded from renting in "nice" lower-cost neighborhoods or grom getting home mortgages. Local banks and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) drew red lines around Black neighborhoods, rating them D-level areas, thus making them ineligible for government-backed mortgage loans. As a result of this practice, called "redlining," most Black people couldn't buy homes, even when they had good jobs with steady paychecks.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“...Jim Crow was the American equivalent of South African apartheid and the racial laws passed in Germany under the Nazi regime of the 1930s. And these similarities are not merely coincidental. Historians have uncovered growing evidence showing that racist parties around the world, including in Nazi Germany, were inspired and guided by the example of American Jim Crow.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“Under Jim Crow, Black Codes harshly restricted what people of color could do, In much of the country, Black people were prevented from voting, serving on juries, running for office, or defending their rights in court. They worked under systems of labor like sharecropping that were designed to keep them in poverty.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“The farther south they drove, the more limiting and repressive the rules became.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“No part of the United States was entirely friendly to Black people in the era of Jim Crow. During this period, which lasted for more than a hundred years, from the abolition of slavery in 1865 to the passing of the landmark federal desegregation and antidiscrimination laws of the mid- to late 1960s, the inequitable treatment of African Americans across the country was slow to change. Discrimination and exclusion were sometimes less overt and obvious in the North, but they were almost equally pervasive and demeaning, even threatening.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“Even in 2019, we felt the simmer of concerns about "driving while Black"; but imagine, back in the 1930s when The Green Book appeared, all the way up through the 1960s, planning a road trip to visit a relative or a family friend and, in the back of your mind, having to worry about the possibility of an encounter that could be intentionally demeaning or deliberately threatening, or that could turn unexpectedly violent, even deadly. African Americans knew then that simply driving--being behind the wheel of a car--was viewed in many parts of the United States as an affront to social restrictions based on white supremacy. In many towns, cities, and states, any white person--not just white law enforcement--could stop and challenge a Black person's right, as an American, to be on the road: the right to be in a particular neighborhood, the right to own a nice car; and the right to simply enjoy the roadways of the United States.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance